It is fascinating to talk to blind people about push-button walk signals. They push the button and wait for a lull in the noise. But then they can’t tell if what they hear is a red light, or just a gap in the speedy traffic. The alternative are those annoying chirping signals that now mark the pace of daily life in crunchy towns like Northampton, M

In 2004, a meta-analysis of dozens of previous studies found that “on average, a 10 percent increase in lane miles induces an immediate 4 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled, which climbs to 10 percent—the entire new capacity—in a few years.”14

For large employers, California has pioneered a second powerful strategy for managing parking, called “parking cash-out.” The California Health and Safety Code requires many businesses that offer free employee parking to give their workers the option of trading that parking space for its cash equivalent. This is an ingenious law, because it is all

These requirements are then passed from city to city and town to town,15 almost always resulting in the same outcome: too much parking. How much? In 2010, the first nationwide count determined that there are half a billion empty parking spaces in America at any given time.16 More to our purposes, a 2002 survey of Seattle’s Central Business District

That said, not all bus systems are duds—far from it. The most remarkable one nationally may be Boulder’s, an inexpensive network that confounds conventional transit wisdom in a number of important ways. Thanks to its system of cleverly branded routes—including the Hop, Skip, and Jump, with each route getting its own color—the city is living up to i

Finally, and most essentially: The main problem with traffic studies is that they almost never consider the phenomenon of induced demand. Induced demand is the name for what happens when increasing the supply of roadways lowers the time cost of driving, causing more people to drive and obliterating any reductions in congestion.

In retrospect I understand that this was utter insanity. Wider, faster, treeless roads not only ruin our public places, they kill people. Taking highway standards and applying them to urban and suburban streets, and even county roads, costs us thousands of lives every year. There is no earthly reason why an engineer would ever design a 14-foot lane

First: The computer model is only as good as its inputs, and there’s nothing easier than tweaking the inputs to get the outcome you want. When we were working in Oklahoma City, the local traffic engineer’s “Synchro” computer model said that our pro-pedestrian proposals would cause gridlock. So we borrowed that engineer’s computer model and handed i

What was certainly missing, among all the parking policy, was a parking plan, and such a comprehensive plan is ultimately what every “over-parked” place in America needs. This plan must include on-street pricing, off-street pricing, in-lieu payments supporting a collective supply, parking benefit districts, and residential permits where needed. Abo